The dialectical debt-image

Image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation.

Walter Benjamin (1999: 463)

quoted by Denise Ferreira da Silva (2022: 189)

Blacklight, or ultraviolet radiation, works through that which it makes shine: for example, it has the capacity to transform at the DNA level, that is, it reprograms the code in the living thing exposed to it, and causes mayhem in their self-reproductive capacity at the cellular level. We could think of this process as one of breaking up a modern substance, that is, of separating form (the code, the formula, the algorithm, or the principle) and matter (content, or that of which something is composed)... Once released by blacklight, the matter becomes available for something that can be termed a recoding—which in the case of cells usually means deadly ungoverned reproduction of cells—or to compositional practices that do not hold that which they combine prisoner to the form (figure or shape) with which it apprehends it.

Denise Ferreira da Silva (2017: np).

In the Bible, as in Mesopotamia, “freedom,” came to refer above all to release from the effects of debt... Over time, the history of the Jewish people itself came to be interpreted in this light: the liberation from bondage in Egypt was God’s first, paradigmatic act of redemption.... Redemption was a release from one’s burden of sin and guilt, and the end of history will be that moment when all slates are wiped clean and all debts finally lifted, when a great blast from angelic trumpets will announce the final Jubilee.

David Graeber (2014: 82)

What would anticolonial artwork accomplish through the form of presentation? For now, ... my answer to this question is: it would corrupt any mode, any form of presentation, by turning it into a confrontation—that is, a presentation that refuses representation.

Denise Ferreira da Silva (2015)

To the financial establishment of the world, we have only one thing to say: We owe you nothing. To our friends, our families, our communities, to humanity and to the natural world that makes our lives possible, we owe you everything.

The Debt Resistors’, (2012: 2).

Unpayable debt—an obligation that one owns but is not one’s to pay.

Denise Ferreira da Silva (2022: 14).

Denise Ferreira da Silva’s Unpayable Debt requires study. Not the highlighted PDF speed-read of today’s outcome-oriented international education market: “Credit pursues the student, offering to match credit for debt, until enough debts, and enough credits have piled up” (Moten and Harney, 2013: 62). Working in the Black radical tradition is “debt work… without payment, without credit without limit” (Moten and Harney, 2013: 64). Sometimes the image that comes from that study isn’t clear at first. It is not sharp like the digital simulation of an SLR lens but it reverts and becomes a dream. The dream image that is also the dialectical image, if you can find the right way to look at it. In their study of debt, feminist activists Lucí Cavallero and Verónica Gago set out no less than 13 ways to engage in a feminist reading of debt (Cavallero, 2021: 5-6). In this first draft towards the study of Unpayable Debt, I can only pose a question that might help to frame that way of seeing. As a white-presenting person of Jewish descent, once a debt activist and now a visual activist, my question is: what is “the image of unpayable debt” (Ferreira da Silva, 2022: 15)? I approach Ferreira da Silva’s assemblage from the angle delineated by Walter Benjamin’s concept of the “image,” a multi-layered composite of time-spaces. Included are Benjamin’s weak Messianism, understood here as the democratic debt jubilee, and his general strike, reconfigured for the present as the feminist strike against debt.

Ferreira da Silva takes her debt image from Octavia Butler’s 1979 novel Kindred, in the famous opening and closing scene, where the lead character Dana finds her arm stuck in the wall of her house at the end of a series of time-and-space travel back to her own ancestor’s past. Dana’s “trouble” begins the day after she moves into a house that she has bought with her partner Kevin (Butler, 2003: 12; Ferreira da Silva, 2022: 164). Dana is not the first or the last Black renter to discover that home ownership is not what it’s cracked up to be. The housing crisis of 2008 decimated Black wealth: “Between 2005 and 2009, the median net worth of black households dropped by 53%, while white household net worth dropped by 17%” (Famighetti and Hamilton, 2019). As in countless horror films, the house becomes the site and sight of loss. Dana becomes housebound because she is afraid that if she was “taken” to the past from somewhere else, she risked being hurt—what if she was traveling in a car at 60 mph? —or would not be able to return home. Time travel dis/ables her in theory before it does in practice. Home is where the hurt is.

By means of this storytelling device, Butler made visible how every instant of US life is and was dialectically connected to layers of other instants in past time throughout white settlement, including the centuries of slavery. The “image” formed in this process is multiple and layered. Like digital media, it contains sound and words, an assemblage that Ferreira da Silva calls “composition” (Ferreira da Silva, 2021: 189). Not to mention layers of meta-data. This composition is not flat like a modernist painting. Rather it is deeply sedimented with layers of time-space, which, in the moment of reanimating encounter, reassemble and de-invisibilize. Benjamin described it as that place “where thinking comes to a standstill in a constellation saturated with tensions—there the dialectical image appears” (Benjamin, 1999: 475). As abolitionist geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore often says, freedom is a place.

Nonetheless that place does not appear the same to all viewers, precisely because it is “a caesura in the moment of thought” (Benjamin, 1999: 475). A caesura is drawn as two lines. Let us say that within the debt-image, one line is that of unpayable debt and the other is that of blackness. What does not happen in and around the dialectical image, then, is anything like Hegelian synthesis. It is “dialectics at a standstill” (Benjamin, 1999: 463). Nonetheless, in that moment of non-circulation and non-commodification, “enormous energies of history” can be liberated (Benjamin, 1999: 463), which can de/re/compose the “image.” The first line of caesura is redemption from debt, as in the Jewish tradition of Jubilee. To redeem has long simultaneously meant to save or deliver the soul from damnation; to free oneself or another from slavery; or to discharge a debt. As the anthropologist David Graeber emphasized in his study of debt, the Biblical Jubilee was a redemption from debt every 7 years and from slavery every fifty (Graeber, 2014: 411 n. 20). The intent was “preventing those burdened by debt from sliding into a permanent underclass” (Houston, 2006: 180), which is precisely what has now happened. Graeber described how the prophet Nehemiah was so angered by the mortgages, debt and humans forced into slavery as debt-pawns that “I rebuked the nobles, and the rulers...And I set a great assembly against them” (2014: 81). This redemption (contained “in the Hebrew words padah and goal” (Graeber, 2014: 80)) is the action not of a deity but, understood prophetically, that of a democracy.

In his famous theses on the philosophy of history, written in the face of the Nazi occupation of France, Benjamin dwelt on such redemption:

our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption. The same applies to our view of the past, which is the concern of history. The past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption. There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. That claim cannot be settled cheaply. Historical materialists are aware of that (Benjamin, 1940).

This passage is not often discussed in terms of debt, but Benjamin highlighted that the claim of the past “cannot be settled cheaply.” There is a certain cost between generations, not rendered in specie, over time, requiring us to work overtime. These are the debts that cannot be paid, to those to whom we owe everything. In that vein, weak Messianism is the past generation requiring the democratic debt jubilee, a redemption on earth.

The second caesura within the debt-image is blackness, because “deployed as method, blackness fractures the glassy walls of universality” (Ferreira da Silva 2017). Considering the work of Nigerian artist Otobong Nkanga via the anticolonial aesthetics of David Lloyd, Ferreira da Silva denies the “the presumed transparency of the subject of aesthetic culture” (2017). What Ferreira da Silva calls blacklight “dissembles and disorganizes accounts of both racial and cisheteropatriarchal subjugation” (Ferreira da Silva, 2022: 28). While the dialectical image can be a composition, blacklight places it in a scale of “re/de/composition.” Blacklight expands the concept of opacity deployed by Martinican philosopher Edouard Glissant. Opacity protects the “Diverse” against the homogenizing tendency of the “transparent” domination of the West, leading Glissant to claim “the right to opacity” (Glissant, 2011: 190). In this sense, opacity is the right to “that which cannot be reduced, which is the most perennial guarantee of participation and confluence” (Glissant, 2011: 191). There is a hint here of Jacques Derrida’s claim that justice cannot be deconstructed and of the assembly required to cancel debts and proclaim Jubilee.

When a white-presenting person like me encounters the “wounded captive body in the scene of subjugation” (Ferreira da Silva, 2022: 15; original emphasis), exemplified by Dana with her arm stuck in the wall, I cannot presume to experience it differently than the white-identified settler colonist. For there is a counter-opacity, the refusal to see what there is to see. A particularly striking example was the naming of the resurgence of white supremacy after the defeat of Black Reconstruction in the United States as “redemption.” Today, such counter-opacity applies to that version of “America” that wants to be “great again” by being white (again). Even the wounded body recurs in the scene of domination. Robert Gober’s Untitled (Leg) (Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1989-90) shows a version of Dana’s situation for a white man. Here, a visibly white man’s leg emerges from the wall. Despite the implication that the man must be dead, the art historical commentary refers to other works of art or to Freud’s concept of the uncanny (unheimlich, or literally “unhomelike”) as if white bodies are always already unwounded. No one that I have seen refers to Octavia Butler.

How might a weakly messianic jewishness—using the lower case to distinguish itself from the Messianism of the present racial colony in Israel—approach this scene? Martinican radical thinker Frantz Fanon saw extensive parallels between Blacks and Jews (Mirzoeff, 2023a: 179-87). Following Aimé Césaire and Jewish intellectual Simone Weil (among many others), Fanon understood fascism as the application of colonial techniques to Europe. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon drew several conclusions. First, he recognized that “the Jew, be he authentic or inauthentic, is labelled a salaud [a person of bad faith]” (Fanon, 2008: 158). In other words, to be called a Jew by a Gentile was itself an act of bad faith, with no other function than to allow racialization. As a result, Fanon maintained that the Jew must be his semblable [fellow]: “What others have said about the Jew applies perfectly to the Black man” (2008: 160). That may not be the case today, but it is precisely here that the past generation calls to the present to recognize, acknowledge and reciprocate the debt of solidarity. It means setting aside the stereotypes in the cultural unconscious, leading Fanon to advocate that the colonized “‘consciousnessize’ [the] unconscious” (2008: 80), work that involves both the individual and the group. For Benjamin, that process was the dialectic of “dream consciousness...and waking consciousness” (Benjamin, 1999: 463). This surrealist moment of awakening creates the “‘now of recognizability’” in the dialectical-dream-debt-image (1999: 464). For the anticolonial jewish person engaging with this four-pointed constellation, that conscious awakening now requires the recognition and acknowledgement of Palestine (Mirzoeff, 2023b). As Fanon first stated in 1956, the colonizer imposes “a new way of seeing” (Mirzoeff, 2023a: 185; original emphasis), which violently intercedes between the colonized and their perception, even of themselves. Rejecting that way of seeing makes it possible to recognize who is the semblable to whom we owe everything by way of solidarity.

If this dialectical debt-image brings the social to a standstill, its projection into the world is the general strike. Writing in 1921 just after the failed German revolution that led to the murder of Rosa Luxemburg, who had formulated the theory of the general strike in 1906, Benjamin saw that “the right to strike, in the view of organized labor, which is opposed to the view of the state, constitutes the right to use violence for the implementation of certain ends” (Benjamin et al., 2021: 43). Fanon equally knew that “decolonization…transforms the spectator crushed to a non-essential state into a privileged actor” (Fanon, 2004: 2), a process that was perceived as violent by the colonizer. From the general strike against slavery (1861-65) to the Paris Commune (1871) and the 2017 feminist strike in Argentina, the general strike is the enactment of the dialectical-dream-debt image as social life, aiming at “an entirely transformed work that is not compelled by the state, an upheaval that this kind of strike does not so much occasion as consummate” (Benjamin, 2021: 52). Verónica Gago understands the feminist strike as a “lens” which “de-invisibilizes” extraction, such that it is always the feminist general strike, one that “weaves together the intensification of insubordination in multiple forms” (Gago, 2020: 11). Its generality moves beyond a specific date to “a refusal of the invisibility of our efforts and labors, and it builds on an understanding that this invisibility structures a political regime based on systematic disregard for those tasks” (2020: 24). Regarding debt, it means “making it visible and situating it as a common problem, de-individualizing it” (Cavallero, 2021: 3; original emphasis). Making a debt-image is, then, in and of itself the strike against debt.

As I argue elsewhere (Mirzoeff, 2016), US debt activism has failed to pay sufficient attention to the racializing and gendered aspects of debt, concentrating instead on a purely financial angle. In 2012, the Occupy Wall Street offshoot Strike Debt organized the Rolling Jubilee in New York. By purchasing debt for pennies on the dollar on the secondary debt market, the Rolling Jubilee was able to abolish some $12 million of medical debt, using $600,000 of donated funds for the purpose. While this was greeted as an amazing success, it contained two failures. Strike Debt had intended this cancelation to bring greater understanding to the process of credit money. A bank or other financial institution that lends funds backs that loan with around 1.5% of its own money. The rest of the money comes from the debtor. That is why banks sell debt: once they have recovered their 1.5%, anything else is profit. But no one followed that thread. Instead, they wanted their debt abolished too. Behind that tactical failure was a conceptual one. It’s true that the Biblical Jubilee abolished debt but it equally abolished slavery under the injunction “remember that you were slaves in Egypt and YHWH your God redeemed you” (Houston, 2006: 186). Canceling debt without anti-antiblackness (from the jewish perspective) is not a debt strike.

The point is not to restore a Biblical approach to debt—tempting as it is to call out the hypocrisy of many—but to stress that the debt-image is not now and has never been singular, flat or isolated in time. The “wounded captive body in the scene of subjugation” expresses that multi-dimensional general strike without providing a simple formula to activate the image. Releasing the captive body is the moment of liberation produced by abolition or decolonization. Studying the scene of debt, forming the debt-image, these are forms of debt strike that now can unfold outside the ossified structures of racial patriarchal capitalism because Denise Ferreira da Silva has given us the map.